Things have come to a pretty pass when we must look to Wall Street to save democracy. The barricades of the American counter-revolution are being manned by Dow Jones, S&P and Nasdaq. If money talks, the almost $10 trillion wiped off US stocks since Donald Trump‘s inauguration – half of it in the last two days of last week – emits a deafening roar of protest. The voice of the Almighty Dollar is shouting stop.
This is not a cause for unalloyed pleasure. Against the amusement of seeing Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos being force-fed a dish of cold comeuppance followed by a hearty helping of just deserts, we must offset the grim reality of millions of ordinary Americans watching helplessly as their pensions dwindle.
And against the relief that at least something is trying to restrain Trump we must set the grim awareness that this something is not the law or Congress, or any of the things the Founding Fathers thought they were putting in place to prevent the emergence of a demagogic dictatorship. It is the amoral instinct of the market.
Yet, we must take what we can get. There are, perhaps, the beginnings of a genuine popular movement of mass resistance to Trump’s anarcho-authoritarian takeover of the American republic. But right now, the most effective pushback appears in the form of vertiginously plunging lines on financial graphs.
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Something is up here. Trump is made of money. Cut him and he bleeds greenbacks. And in political terms, his raison d’être is to make rich people richer. Strip away all the pouting and posturing and the purpose is familiar – strengthening capital against labour, stripping public assets (including the most precious public asset of all which is our planetary life-support system) for private gain, delivering tax cuts for oligarchs while freeing them of the burdens of regulation.
Trumpism is money Maga-fied into absolute crassness, shorn of niceties and pretence. It is the fulfilment of Bob Dylan’s incantation: “Money doesn’t talk, it swears/ Obscenity, who really cares”. In Trump’s obscene, swaggering, swearing persona, the mask of monetary civility (the faces of those iconic presidents on the dollar bills) is ripped away. The soft rustling of folding green becomes the braying of the self-intoxicated bully.
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Yet the hive mind of capitalism is alarmed by the demon it has summoned from its own depths. Wall Street’s affrighted response to Trump’s tariffs is all the more striking because it is not a one-off phenomenon.
It is the second time in less than three years that a radical right-wing government in the English-speaking world has collided with financial markets. In the case of Liz Truss in 2020, the collision was fatal. Trump is still very much alive politically, but his careening clown car is now in a demolition derby. We do not yet know how much damage it can sustain before it breaks down.
The repetition of the same drama suggests that something bigger is going on here. It will take a long time for history’s camera to pan out from the quotidian mayhem. “We are closed in,” – and here I evoke my Yeats Index in which the more the poet is being quoted in public discourse the worse everything is – “and the key is turned/ On our uncertainty.”
Yet we might hazard a guess at the nature of the contradictions shaping this crisis.
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The first contradiction concerns the sense of loss. Right-wing politics has reached a point where its greatest asset is the devastation it itself imposed on the industrial working class. Its icons are still Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, whose neoliberalism replaced manufacturing industry with finance capitalism.
The right has, in recent years, discovered the political potency of the grief that lingers long after the death of the old working class. After shutting down the coal mines, it is mining the pain of their loss. The political seam is rich and deep.
The problem, though, is that the right can’t offer genuine redress, which could only come in the form of a redistribution of the vast wealth of the new economy towards those communities that lost out in the process of its creation. All it can give is a dream of exit from postwar history – Brexit in Britain, tariff wars in the US. But these are madcap gestures, not serious plans for economic growth. Exploiting the sense of loss leads to a literal loss of wealth.
The second fault line is self-pity. Brexit and Trumpism are drenched in it. They reimagine rich and powerfully privileged societies as desperately oppressed victims. Trump’s Liberation Day speech evoked an America “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered” by, among others, Vietnam – a historical irony far beyond the bounds of satiric exaggeration. But self-pity is bad for capitalism, a system that demands an endless supply of irrational exuberance: feel-good economics undercut by feel-bad politics.
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Third, there is the problem of predictability. Investment is driven by a belief that it is possible to foretell the future. That this is an obvious illusion does not make it less essential to capitalism. Yet the political project of the right is now authoritarian and the very essence of the dictator is a monopoly on unpredictability. The cult of personality that comes with this territory elevates the leader far above the ordinary, and thus above the rational. Trump, to his followers, is semidivine.
The demigod does not have policies. He has urges, gut feelings, inspirations. He intuits truths not apparent to anyone else. And precisely because no one else can have these impulses, no one else can predict them. For the true believers, this volatility is proof of the leader’s indispensable uniqueness. But for capitalism it is disastrous. It shatters the necessary illusion of a knowable future.
These contradictions are so fundamental that the only real surprise is how quickly they have come to a head. Money, seeing itself reflected so starkly naked in the political mirror, is issuing an involuntary cry of alarm. How soon will it be forced into more articulate speech?
